Pavel Shatev

Pavel Potsev Shatev (Bulgarian and Macedonian: Павел Поцев Шатев) (July 15, 1882 – January 30, 1951) was a Bulgarian revolutionary and member of the left wing of the Internal Macedonian-Adrianople Revolutionary Organization (IMARO), later becoming a left-wing political activist.[1][2][3] Even though he was jailed in post-WWII SR Macedonia as an enemy of the state and self-declared as a Bulgarian,[4] according to the modern historiography in North Macedonia,[5][6][7] he was an ethnic Macedonian.[8][9][10]

Pavel Potsev Shatev
Born(1882-07-15)July 15, 1882
Kratovo, Kosovo Vilayet, Ottoman Empire
DiedJanuary 30, 1951(1951-01-30) (aged 68)
Bitola, SFRY
NationalityOttoman/Bulgarian/Yugoslav
OrganizationIMRO (United)
Known forThessaloniki bombings of 1903
Notable work
"In Macedonia under yoke" (1934)

Biography

Born in Kratovo, in the Kosovo Vilayet of the Ottoman Empire (present-day North Macedonia), Shatev graduated from the Bulgarian Men's High School of Thessaloniki. At first he participated in a group that make plans for a bomb attack in Istanbul. In 1900 the Ottoman police arrested the whole group, including Shatev. In 1901 the prisoners were deported το Bulgaria, after pressure from the Bulgarian government, where they consulted with members of a small anarchist group in Salonika, who agreed to blow up the local branch of the Ottoman Bank. In late April 1903, together with a group of young anarchists from the Gemidzhii Circle, he launched a campaign of terror bombing known as the Thessaloniki bombings of 1903. He used dynamite to blow up the French ship "Guadalquivir" which was leaving Thessaloniki harbour. He was captured and sentenced to death, but later his sentence was changed to life imprisonment in Fezzan in modern-day Libya.

In 1908, after the Young Turks revolution, Shatev was given amnesty, went to Bulgaria and graduated in law at Sofia University. In the next few years he worked as a teacher and journalist. In 1912 Shatev was appointed a teacher in Thessaloniki Bulgarian Men's High school and witnessed its destruction by Greek troops on June 18, 1913 during the Second Balkan War. He participated as a Bulgarian soldier in the First World War. During the 1920s Shatev became a member of the Macedonian Federative Organisation but after the coup in 1923, he emigrated from Sofia to Vienna. Here he get in contact with the Soviet Embassy and was recruited as a Soviet spy and Comintern activist.[11] In 1925, Shatev was one of the founders of Comintern sponsored IMRO (United) in Vienna, but later he was disappointed with its activity and moved to Istanbul. There he founded another offshoot of IMRO (United). In the early 1930s, he went back to Bulgaria and worked as a lawyer and publicist. After the beginning of World War II, he was engaged in Communist conspiracy. As this was considered a political offence, he was arrested in Sofia and sentenced to 15 years of prison.

After the end of the war, Shatev was released and took part in the creation of the new People's Republic of Macedonia as a member of ASNOM.[12] He was elected Minister of Justice in the first communist government and later became vice-chairman of the Presidium of ASNOM. After the first elections for parliament, Shatev became a deputy. Nevertheless, such Macedonian activists, who came from the IMRO (United) and the Bulgarian Communist Party never managed to get rid of their bulgarophile bias.[13]

Meanwhile, from the start of the new Yugoslavia, the authorities organised frequent purges and trials of Macedonian communists and non-party people charged with autonomist deviation. Many of the former left-wing IMRO government officials were purged from their positions, then isolated, arrested, imprisoned or executed on various charges including pro-Bulgarian leanings, demands for greater independence of Yugoslav Macedonia, collaboration with the Cominform after the Tito-Stalin split in 1948, and the like.[14] In 1946 Shatev wrote a complaint to the Bulgarian embassy in Belgrade, in which he argued that the new Macedonian language is Serbianized and the use of Bulgarian language is prohibited in Macedonia and required the intervention of the Bulgarian leader Georgi Dimitrov.[15]

In 1948, fully disappointed with the policy of the new Yugoslav authorities, Shatev, together with Panko Brashnarov, complained in letters to Joseph Stalin and to Georgi Dimitrov and asked for help, maintaining better relations with Bulgaria and the Soviet Union.[16] As a result, he was jailed for his alleged pro-Bulgarian and anti-Yugoslav sympathies for a one year.[17] After that, Shatev was taken into home custody in Bitola. On January 30, 1951, his dead body was found on Bitola's dung-hill.

Literature

References
  1. Павел Шатев, “Националните малцинства и самоопределението на народите - трагедията на Балканите“ - 1936 година, София..
  2. "В Mакедония под робство. Солунското съзаклятие (1903)" Павел Шатев (Трето издание, Изд. на Отеч. фронт, София, 1983 г.
  3. Солунскиятъ атентатъ и заточеницитѣ въ Фезанъ, Павелъ П. Шатевъ, „Македонски Наученъ Институтъ”, София - печатница П. Глушковъ - 1927 г.
  4. Anastas Vangeli, Facing the Yugoslav Communist Past in Contemporary Macedonia: Tales of Continuity, Nostalgia and Victimization; pp. 183-205 in Politics of Memory in Post-Communist Europe, with ed. Corina Dobos and Marius Stan, Volume 1; Zeta Books, 2011, ISBN 9731997865, p. 201.
  5. "At any rate, the beginning of the active national-historical direction with the historical “masterpieces”, which was for the first time possible in 1944, developed in Macedonia much harder than was the case with the creation of the neighbouring nations of the Greeks, Serbs, Bulgarians and others in the 19th century. These neighbours almost completely "plundered" the historical events and characters from the land, and there was only debris left for the belated nation. A consequence of this was that first that parts of the “plundered history” were returned, and a second was that an attempt was made to make the debris become a fundamental part of an autochthonous history. This resulted in a long phase of experimenting and revising, during which the influence of non-scientific instances increased. This specific link of politics with historiography in the Socialist Republic of Macedonia... was that this was a case of mutual dependence, i.e. influence between politics and historical science, where historians do not simply have the role of registrars obedient to orders. For their significant political influence, they had to pay the price for the rigidity of the science... There is no similar case of mutual dependence of historiography and politics on such a level in Eastern or Southeast Europe." For more see: Stefan Trobest, “Historical Politics and Histrocial ‘Masterpieces’ in Macedonia before and after 1991”, New Balkan Politics, 6 (2003).
  6. The origins of the official Macedonian national narrative are to be sought in the establishment in 1944 of the Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia. This open acknowledgment of the Macedonian national identity led to the creation of a revisionist historiography whose goal has been to affirm the existence of the Macedonian nation through the history. Macedonian historiography is revising a considerable part of ancient, medieval, and modern histories of the Balkans. Its goal is to claim for the Macedonian peoples a considerable part of what the Greeks consider Greek history and the Bulgarians Bulgarian history. The claim is that most of the Slavic population of Macedonia in the 19th and first half of the 20th century was ethnic Macedonian. For more see: Victor Roudometof, Collective Memory, National Identity, and Ethnic Conflict: Greece, Bulgaria, and the Macedonian Question, Greenwood Publishing Group, 2002, ISBN 0275976483, p. 58; Victor Roudometof, Nationalism and Identity Politics in the Balkans: Greece and the Macedonian Question in Journal of Modern Greek Studies 14.2 (1996) 253-301.
  7. Yugoslav Communists recognized the existence of a Macedonian nationality during WWII to quiet fears of the Macedonian population that a communist Yugoslavia would continue to follow the former Yugoslav policy of forced Serbianization. Hence, for them to recognize the inhabitants of Macedonia as Bulgarians would be tantamount to admitting that they should be part of the Bulgarian state. For that the Yugoslav Communists were most anxious to mold Macedonian history to fit their conception of Macedonian consciousness. The treatment of Macedonian history in Communist Yugoslavia had the same primary goal as the creation of the Macedonian language: to de-Bulgarize the Macedonian Slavs and to create a separate national consciousness that would inspire identification with Yugoslavia. For more see: Stephen E. Palmer, Robert R. King, Yugoslav communism and the Macedonian question, Archon Books, 1971, ISBN 0208008217, Chapter 9: The encouragement of Macedonian culture.
  8. The first name of the IMRO was "Bulgarian Macedonian-Adrianople Revolutionary Committees", which was later changed several times. Initially its membership was restricted only for Bulgarians. It was active not only in Macedonia but also in Thrace (the Vilayet of Adrianople). Since its early name emphasized the Bulgarian nature of the organization by linking the inhabitants of Thrace and Macedonia to Bulgaria, these facts are still difficult to be explained from the Macedonian historiography. They suggest that IMRO revolutionaries in the Ottoman period did not differentiate between ‘Macedonians’ and ‘Bulgarians’. Moreover, as their own writings attest, they often saw themselves and their compatriots as ‘Bulgarians’ and wrote in Bulgarian standard language. For more see: Brunnbauer, Ulf (2004) Historiography, Myths and the Nation in the Republic of Macedonia. In: Brunnbauer, Ulf, (ed.) (Re)Writing History. Historiography in Southeast Europe after Socialism. Studies on South East Europe, vol. 4. LIT, Münster, pp. 165-200 ISBN 382587365X.
  9. Nevertheless, according to the Macedonian historian Academician Ivan Katardzhiev all left-wing Macedonian revolutionaries from the period until the early 1930s declared themselves as "Bulgarians" and he asserts that the political separatism of some Macedonian revolutionaties toward official Bulgarian policy was yet only political phenomenon without ethnic character. Katardzhiev claims all those veterans from IMRO (United) and Bulgarian communist party remained only at the level of political, not of national separatism. Thus, they practically continued to feel themselves as Bulgarians, i.e. they didn't developed clear national separatist position even in Communist Yugoslavia. This will bring even one of them - Dimitar Vlahov on the session of the Politburo of the Macedonian communist party in 1948, to say that in 1932 (when left wing of IMRO issued for the first time the idea of separate Macedonian nation) a mistake was made. Академик Катарџиев, Иван. Верувам во националниот имунитет на македонецот, интервју за списание „Форум“, 22 jули 2000, броj 329. For more see Tchavdar Marinov, Famous Macedonia, the Land of Alexander: Macedonian Identity at the Crossroads of Greek, Bulgarian and Serbian Nationalism in Entangled Histories of the Balkans - Volume One, BRILL, 2013, ISBN 9789004250765, pp 273-330.
  10. On the other hand, PhD Zoran Todorovski, a specialist in the history of the Macedonian revolutionary movement and former director of the national Archive in RoM, published a monograph praising the right-wing IMRO under the anticommunist leadership of Ivan Mihajlov. Todorovski, by that point established as revisionist historian, released an edited collection of writings of Mihajlov’s precursor – Todor Aleksandrov. On that occasion, he referred positively to Bulgarian academic studies. He has confirmed also that in post-Ottoman times all right-wing IMRO revolutionaries undoubtedly considered themselves as Bulgarians. Todorovski claims inter-war VMRO had been a champion of independent Macedonian statehood and should, therefore, be considered part of the national tradition, despite the Bulgarian nationalist contradictions of its leaders. He asserts that the ethnic Macedonian - Bulgarian division between left and right-wing Macedonian revolutionaries is unacceptable and in a national sense, they were all with Bulgarian consciousness. Интервю со д-р Зоран Тодоровски, "Уште робуваме на старите поделби", Разговор со приредувачот на Зборникот документи за Тодор Александров, сп.Трибуна, брой 5, 2005 г. For more see: Tchavdar Marinov and Alexander Vezenkov, Communism and Nationalism in the Balkans: Marriage of Convenience or Mutual Attraction? in Entangled Histories of the Balkans - Volume Two, BRILL, 2013, ISBN 9004261915, pp 469-555.
  11. Historical Dictionary of the Republic of Macedonia, Dimitar Bechev, Scarecrow Press, 2009, ISBN 0810862956, pp. 199-200.
  12. We, the people: politics of national peculiarity in Southeastern Europe, Diana Mishkova, Central European University Press, 2009, ISBN 963-9776-28-9, p. 130.
  13. Palmer, S. and R. King Yugoslav Communism and the Macedonian Question, Archon Books (June 1971), p. 137.
  14. Das makedonische Jahrhundert: von den Anfängen der nationalrevolutionären Bewegung zum Abkommen von Ohrid 1893-2001; Stefan Troebst, Publisher Oldenbourg Wissenschaftsverlag, 2007, ISBN 978-3-486-58050-1 p . 256.
  15. Катарџиев, Иван. Васил Ивановски - живот и дело, предговор кон: Ивановски, Васил. Зошто ние Македонците сме одделна нација, Избрани дела, Скопје, 1995, стр. 50.
  16. After the annihilation of the pro-Bulgarian right-wing elements after 1945, the Yugoslav authorities concentrated their attention on communists with a Bulgarian past and pro-Bulgarian comments. One such was Venko Markovski, who dared to oppose Koneski's ideas on the Serbianization of the Macedonian language. Others were Panko Brashnarov and Pavel Shatev, who wrote letters to Georgi Dimitrov and Stalin to complain about Tito and to ask for help in maintaining the Bulgarian character of Macedonia. Another was Metodija Andonov- Cento, who became the first president of the Yugoslav People's Republic of Macedonia and demanded a united and independent Macedonia outside Yugoslavia. The Yugoslav communists created special gulags in Idrizovo, near Skopje and Goli Otok, a barren island in Croatia, where they sent such pro-Bulgarian or pro-Macedonian independence agitators. For more see: Contested Ethnic Identity: The Case of Macedonian Immigrants in Toronto, 1900-1996, Chris Kostov, Peter Lang, 2010, ISBN 3-0343-0196-0, p. 88.
  17. Macedonia's child-grandfathers: the transnational politics of memory, exile, and return, 1948-1998, Author Keith Brown, Publisher Henry M. Jackson, University of Washington, 2003 p. 33.
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